Ebonics: When All Becomes a Sign

I was thinking about signs yesterday in our discussion and as soon as the signifier was “Dog” my mind jumped to the signified as the idea of a “homie” (lol). As I sat there my mind began to question how does Ebonics fit into this discussion of signs? In the words of Jeff I thought this could be a “Juicy” topic for discussion. In questioning if this is applicable to the class I thought this is definitely within the realm of culture and then I thought about how Ebonics puts a complex twist on ‘visual’ culture.

I thought of movies where white guys, black nerds even, would attempt to use “Ebonics” and they were the wrong sign to use the sign language. So then the rules are broken. So this concept of Ebonics and people as a sign within the sign language made me see that within that language Everything is a sign.

Do you all think that this is true in all languages? What do you all think about the process of becoming an acceptable sign (a movie that depicts that in the context of Ebonics would be Bulworth http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118798/ )?

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2 comments

I completely agree that this is a “juicy topic”! One might describe Ebonics as a linguistic subcommunity or as a dialect. What is so interesting is when that dialect becomes influential on other dialects, as all of its meanings begin to change. What had previously been markers of inclusion in a special community instead gradually become markers of “cool” that everyone wants, and then people originally outside that community appropriate those markers. But now they no longer signify inclusion/exclusion in the same ways, and the boundaries become complex. They do remain, however: for example, use of the n-word has been reappropriated by some African-Americans and that reappropriation is extremely difficult to imitate or pick up by, for example, whites. In a similar way, the word “queer” has been reappropriated by some in the gay community. So the divisions don’t go away, they just become semantically dense, which is also pretty interesting.

There is a famous, and politically uncorrect, bit from the 1970s comedy Airplane. In it, a white flight attendant is unable to communicate with two Ebonics-speaking black passengers until she gets some unexpected help:

I won’t say any more about this for now. But I will share something I’ve never seen before (O the glory of YouTube) and that is this an example of the sort of unending workings of “intertextuality” that we talked about today: